IN recent years much has been said and written about milk as the most nearly perfect of all modern foods, but it is important to realize that it is also the most venerable of human nutriments. Its use began long before recorded history, and it has continued throughout the ages to be a staple part of the human diet. Man's making friends with the lactating animals, such as the cow and the goat, was a significant step in the advancement of human nutrition and therefore of civilization as well. Butter and cheese proved to be important ways of preserving the food values of milk, and their invention, though probably accidental in both instances, was an important contribution to human nutrition. In the long history of dairying, custom and accidental discovery have probably been more important than conscious experimentation and innovation.

It is now five hundred years since the Byzantine empire was brought to an end by the Ottoman Turks, Scholars today quite justly reject Gibbon's assumption that the Byzantine empire was, throughput its entire existence, in a state of decline. They have come to rank it, instead, as one of the great empires in history. And this for good reasons. It endured for over a thousand years. Down to about the middle of the eleventh century it was the center of civilization in Christendom. It preserved the thought and literature of antiquity; it developed new forms of art; it held back the barbarians. It produced great statesmen, soldiers, and diplomats as well as reformers and renowned scholars. Its missionaries, aided by its diplomats and sometimes by its armies, spread the gospel among the pagan tribes, especially the Slavs, which dwelt along its frontiers and beyond. As a Czech historian has put it, Byzantium “molded the undisciplined tribes of Serbs, Bulgars, Russians, Croats even, and made nations out of them; it gave to them its religion and institutions, taught their princes how to govern, transmitted to them the very principles of civilization—writing and literature.” Byzantium was a great power and a great civilizing force.

The history of European trade is replete with cases of aggressive and restrictive commercial policies. These policies were part of the permanent nature of economic relationships among European nations from feudalism onward. Keynes' golden age passage in The Economic Consequences of the Peace exaggerates the extent to which prewar Europe was a free trade zone.

This article analyzes aspects of secular urban growth in two systems of cities in the mid-Atlantic states. One system centers on New York City; the other on Philadelphia. The author finds that the growth oi New York's hinterland was an important factor in explaining that system's relatively rapid expansion through the War of 1812. In subsequent years, this situation changed; basing his analysis on cross-sectional data, the author shows that relatively simple patterns of development gave way to complex situations shaped by the differential impacts of transportation, manufacturing, and commerce on these two urban systems.

The possession of a few copper cents [in 1862] meant that the owner could ride [the street car] rather than walk…. It meant that he could buy a postage stamp without an altercation with the clerk, or a cigar without receiving in change a handful of the dealer's own manufactured currency.

Louis XIV created the Council of Trade on June 29, 1700, to advise the controller general and the secretary of the marine on economic matters. The Council was to examine

… all propositions and memoranda sent it, together with such matters and difficulties which may there arise concerning external and internal trade by land and by sea, as well as factories and manufactories, in order that His Majesty may take appropriate action on the reports which the said Council of Trade will make to him of its deliberations.

The story is told that Dean Donham of the Harvard Business School once asked Professor Schumpeter, after a lecture on the entrepreneur—Schumpeter's plumed knight of economic development–what was the most important single factor in accounting for the success of the businessman. Quick as a shot came the answer: “Good health.” For purposes of this inquiry into certain aspects of American social structure and American values which seem to have been of decisive importance in contributing to American economic growth, certain variables–like the health of the businessman and the endowment of the country with respect to natural resources –will not be considered.

I use unique city-month level disaggregated data, from public employment offices, to estimate the matching functions for the 1920s and the early 1930s. The results show that the public labor exchange was slack, a relative deficiency of job vacancies, in the 1920s and it became slacker during the Great Depression. However, the findings show that there was no deterioration of the matching efficiency in the early 1930s. The outcome of a deficiency of labor demand during the 1930s implies that there was a need for effective government policies to implement the new job-creation programs.

After peaking around the mid-eighteenth century, grain market integration in China declined by a colossal 80 percent amid a twofold increase in population and remained at low levels for well over a century. Markets only resumed their growth momentum after the largest peasant revolt—the Taiping Rebellion—wiped out roughly one-sixth of the Chinese population starting 1851. This U-shaped pattern of grain market integration distinguished China from Europe in their trajectories of market development. Using grain prices to divide China into grain-deficit and grainsurplus regions, we find that the negative relationship between population growth and market integration originated from the grain-surplus-cum-exporting regions.

In 1966, after more than 700 years, the irrigation community in Mula (Spain) switched from auctions to quotas to allocate water from its river. This change happened in the absence of either political or technological change. Quotas were more efficient, but required that farmers own water property rights. I develop a model in which poor farmers cannot credibly commit to purchase water rights. I show that empirical evidence on savings and prices is consistent with this interpretation. A temporary increase in output prices in the 1950s and better financial institutions allowed farmers to accumulate savings and solve the commitment problem.

The United State has experienced tremendous improvements in its standard of living over the past hundred years, as have most nations in the developed world.This dissertation was completed at Ohio State University under the supervision of Richard Steckel. We now accept as necessities many things that our grandparents would have considered to be luxuries; we also enjoy countless goods, devices, and services completely unknown a century ago. Far fewer workers are required to produce the necessities of life that we now consume, and therefore an increasing number of us have time to devote to leisure activities, such as entertainment and recreation.

We argue that falling farm product prices, incomes, and spending may explain 10–30 percent of the 1930 U.S. output decline. Crop prices collapsed, reducing farmers’ incomes. And across U.S. states and Ohio counties, auto sales fell most in crop-growing areas. The large spending response may be explained by farmers’ indebtedness. Reasonable assumptions about the marginal propensity to spend of farmers relative to nonfarmers and the pass-through of farm prices to retail prices imply that the collapse of farm product prices in 1930 was a powerful propagation mechanism worsening the Depression.

This paper examines the failures or in some cases near-failures of financial institutions that started the 12 most severe peacetime financial panics in the United States, beginning with the Panic of 1819 and ending with the Panic of 2008. The following generalizations were true in most cases, although not in all. (1) Panics were triggered by a short series of failures or near-failures; (2) many of the failing institutions were what we would now call shadow banks; (3) typically, the source of trouble was an excessive investment in real estate; and (4) typically, they had outstanding reputations for trustworthiness, prudence, and financial acumen—before they failed. It appears that in these respects the Panic of 2008 was an old-school panic.

[a panic] occurs when a succession of unexpected failures has created in the mercantile, and sometimes also in the non-mercantile public a general distrust in each other’s solvency; disposing every one not only to refuse fresh credit, except on very onerous terms, but to call in, if possible all credit which he has already given.

—John Stuart Mill

All of this has happened before, and it will all happen again.

—Peter Pan

This paper, as presented at the Fourth Congress of the International Economic History Association, is the first of four concerned with economic growth in England before the industrial revolution, in what, for purposes of brevity and analytical distinction, I propose to call “preindustrial England.” It might be prudent for this period to talk of “economic change” (“the movement of economic processes over time”) rather than “economic growth” (“the growth of output per head of population”), because change does not necessarily imply growth, and because, for the thousand years which preceded English industrialization, the historians are uncertain about the direction and duration of the secular trend of the economy over long periods, although they seem to have identified some periods of growth as well as some periods of decline.

Japanese historians have characterized the Tokugawa period (1600–1868) as an “early modern feudal system” (kinsei hòken seido). While there is disagreement on the nature of feudalism in general, and the form of feudalism in the Tokugawa period in particular, I believe that Tokugawa society does include the essential elements of a feudal system so as to justify this label. What is particularly conspicuous is that Japan, like Europe, experienced feudalism before the birth of the modern age. In the case of Japan, as Professor E. O. Reischauer has pointed out, feudalism permitted the development of a goal-oriented ethic, rather than a status-oriented ethic, a strong sense of duty and obligation, and excluded the non warrior class from political power. Professor R. N. Bellah has differentiated the social values of Japan's feudalism from those of European feudalism by stressing the element of “loyalty” in the former and identifying this value as a key to the modernization of Japan. Whatever the special characteristics of feudalism in Japan may be, all analysts agree that the term “feudalism” is appropriate as a description of Tokugawa society.

A Widespread belief exists that those disequilibrating international capital flows known as “hot money movements” and the associated measures instituted to regulate transactions in foreign exchange were peculiar to the post-1914 era and especially to the epoch of the “Great Depression” that commenced after 1929. It is felt that the “relative” stability of world economic and political conditions associated with the operation of the pre-1914 gold standard precluded “hot money” transfers and obviated the need to control the foreign exchange market.1 The experience of the United States during the depression of the 1890's vitiates the accuracy of this sweeping generalization. To be sure, these phenomena were largely unrecognized before the depression of the 1930's, but they nevertheless existed. The purpose of this article is to examine one such pre-1930 hot money movement, the one that occurred during the American presidential election campaign of 1896. The nomination of William Jennings Bryan as the Democratic candidate on a free silver platform at Chicago in July 1896 gave impetus to a major disequilibrating outflow of short-term funds. This condition, in turn, led to an interesting effort to control the foreign exchange market.

Japan's transformation into a modern state began shortly after the middle of the nineteenth century when she was forcibly opened to international trade. In the ensuing years, the old social, economic, and political structure was overhauled to the end that Japan might become a powerful nation able to stand on an equal footing with the more advanced Western nations. Early attention was given to land reform and peasant emancipation since the country was predominantly agricultural, with about four fifths of the population engaged in cultivating the soil. In the early 1870's the prevailing system of servile land tenure was swept away and replaced by a system of private ownership of land. Henceforth, the peasants, who had formerly held land from feudal nobles in return for certain dues and services, were given title to land on which they, as owners, paid a land tax.